"You have no idea how big that is. This is giant on a scale where it's not just that we can't see what's doing it; it's that the entire makeup of the universe as we understand it can't be right if this is happening."
posted by WCityMike on Sep 1, 2009 - 84 comments

Amazing zoomable images of the Extended Groth Strip and Orion Nebula.
posted by paradoxflow on Aug 15, 2009 - 39 comments

Welcome to the Universe - III: The Size of Things . . .we take a breif trip through the Solar System and beyond to see the size of the Universe. A youtube video by AndromedasWake about the scale of the Universe.
posted by nola on Jul 8, 2009 - 20 comments

One of the hardest things for people to understand about the universe is just how big it is. There are three approaches typically used in describing its size. The first, the song, was pioneered by Monty Python (NSFWish, wireframe of naked woman) and then done just as masterfully by the Animaniacs. The second, the zoom method has been featured twice before here on the blue. The third method is the comparison method (skip to 1:30, unless you like looking at a image of the solar system with terrible distorted orbits), yielding some truly beautiful videos (this one found via the fantastic Bad Astronomy blog). These videos go, at most, as far as looking at the local cluster or the Virgo Supercluster. There are two videos that attempt to show the size of the entire universe, one unsuccessfully (although with great music) and one successfully. (Warning, all links except the first one, are to YT videos). [more inside]
posted by Hactar on Jul 1, 2009 - 74 comments

New burst vaporizes cosmic distance record. "NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen."
posted by homunculus on Apr 28, 2009 - 13 comments

Exit Mundi's thoughts on the latest anticipated apocalypse: the coming apocalypse in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 A.D.. (No kidding.) [more inside]
posted by WCityMike on Jan 3, 2009 - 79 comments

Is the Multiverse Real? Discover takes a look at theories that our universe is one of many. This blogger adds some interesting commentary. via
posted by Bookhouse on Nov 16, 2008 - 35 comments

Beyond the Reach of God. Thought experiments involving the God-universe and the Nature-universe, the Turing-complete Game of Life, and a lot of insightful back-and-forth in the comment section, to boot. One of the most interesting and thought-provoking essays I've read on the Internet in a very long time, by Eliezer Yudkowsky on his blog, Overcoming Bias (via).
posted by WCityMike on Oct 9, 2008 - 64 comments

Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space. "As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered. Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon 'dark flow.' The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude." [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Sep 25, 2008 - 73 comments

An Interactive Space Simulator "Smash planets together, introduce rogue stars, and build new worlds from spinning discs of debris. Fire a moon into a planet or destroy everything you've created with a super massive black hole. You can simulate and interact with our solar system: the 8 planets,160+ moons, and hundereds of asteroids, the nearest 1000 stars to our Sun, and our local group of galaxies." [31Mb, Windows only, sorry, but see inside for similar Mac and Linux apps] [more inside]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken on Jul 11, 2008 - 27 comments

Google Sky we'll help us find our way, someday.
posted by plexi on Mar 14, 2008 - 32 comments

Astronomers find a giant hole a billion light years across & located 8 billion light years away from us. They believe it could be evidence of another Universe at the edge of ours.
posted by scalefree on Nov 27, 2007 - 53 comments

Collective Perception
posted by Soup on Nov 18, 2007 - 38 comments

The Horizon Simulation 70 billions particles : a new world record for a large scale simulation of the universe. [more inside]
posted by bru on Sep 18, 2007 - 29 comments

Remember CERN from The Da Vinci Code? And their mega-project the Large Hadron Collider(previously mentioned here?) This BBC Horizons show, The Six Billion Dollar Experiment, does a good job illustrating why such an experiment is so cool, important and fascinating. Apparently, the universe is finite. (Includes Google Video-last link)
posted by snsranch on Aug 2, 2007 - 75 comments

Universe is the newest project from Jonathan Harris, who was also behind the amazing WeFeelFine, and the Yahoo Time Capsule. Here's a talk he gave about his projects at TED 2007.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken on Jul 25, 2007 - 20 comments

From the Big Bang to Iraq: Jorn Barger's logarithmic timeline of the universe [Previous RobotWisdomFilter: 1, 2, 3, 4].
posted by hoverboards don't work on water on May 19, 2007 - 19 comments

The universe [flash]. I know, it's on a corporate site, and you have to sit through some pretentious Japanglish while it loads, but being able to use your mousewheel to scroll from femtometers up to the 100 billion lightyear scale is dazzling. I love cosmic zooms. Remember to pray that there's intelligent life in space, because there's bugger-all down here on Earth, except for folks like Metafilter's own kokogiak, who shows us everything in the solar system bigger than 200 miles in diameter.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken on Mar 30, 2007 - 29 comments

Have you ever wondered what a solar eclipse would look like from space? The STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) has just sent back its view (awe-inspiring video included). It has also sent back some gorgeous pictures of our sun (and the McNaught Comet). For more media, check out the other galleries (including some 3D images). For more about the project, see NASA's STEREO homepage. Be sure to also stop by the Johns Hopkins University STEREO Page, where you can download a mission guide (pdf), view animations, watch a video of the launch, or even make your own papercraft STEREO model (pdf). You can also learn more in six minute segments with their series of short educational videos.
posted by wander on Mar 13, 2007 - 15 comments

How to blow up the Earth (with a coffee can), and why we should, along with some discussion of how it is done in fiction. Blowing up the moon (and how the US nearly did in 1958, with the help of Carl Sagan), and lots of reasons why, including one in song [YouTube]. How to blow up a star. How we might accidentally blow up the universe in November. [prev. discussion of Earth destruction]
posted by blahblahblah on Feb 22, 2007 - 32 comments

The sound of the Universe being born. University of Washington professor calculates the frequencies of sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years by analyzing small differences in sky temperature. More information here and here.
posted by zaebiz on Oct 5, 2006 - 26 comments

Imagining the Tenth Dimension (Flash). 10th dimensional physics and string theory don't get any easier than this.
posted by Jimbob on Jul 4, 2006 - 76 comments

As the Pentagon ousts plans to turn insects into cyber war machines you'd be forgiven for asking the question: Where does the real digital end and the faked life begin? Are we simulating life synthetically? or just speeding up an entirely natural process? Technologically engineered life is here to stay. Its not far fetched to speculate that simulacra may become all there is.
posted by 0bvious on Mar 15, 2006 - 13 comments

The Wiki History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less [via]
posted by moonbird on Feb 17, 2006 - 14 comments

If the universe is a hologram and the healthy human brain a valve of consciousness then where'd this mental infinity come from? Are we simply living the simulacrum? Or does Pi protect us all, forever, infinitely?
posted by 0bvious on Nov 22, 2005 - 39 comments

The PHENIX (Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) collaboration hopes to study a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, which they think was present in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. And they have games!
posted by goatdog on May 11, 2005 - 3 comments

Misconceptions about the Big Bang
posted by Gyan on Feb 23, 2005 - 39 comments

Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it wasn't always so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.

How things have changed. (Yours now, $110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of two planets and one moon (with a second in the works). Actually, we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.

Maybe Not.
posted by absalom on Jan 27, 2005 - 17 comments

That hole in the backyard would not have gone to China. In fact, most of MeFi's readers would have ended up causing quite a leak. With so many 2d projections out there, who can blame us? There is always this introduction to map projections. You can then make your own projection or your own globe. At least it's not as hard as a 2d spacetime map of the universe (with relativity!).
posted by ontic on Dec 11, 2004 - 18 comments

Absolutely, The Universe Could Be Funnel-Shaped At an extreme enough point, you would be able to see the back of your own head. It would be an interesting place to explore - but we are probably too far from the narrow end of the horn to examine it with telescopes. Frank Steiner’s Quantum Chaos group
posted by mcgraw on Apr 15, 2004 - 11 comments

The shape of the universe may well be a dodecahedron. New research from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe suggests a finite universe with a definite shape. One up for Plato, who, following Pythagoras, maintained that “God used this solid for the whole universe, embroidering figures on it.”. So it appears. .. all expressed much more lucidly by the Economist.
posted by grahamwell on Oct 11, 2003 - 14 comments

Beginnings at the Library of Congress. The origins of the Universe, humanity and society as viewed by different cultural and religious traditions; and their attempts to explain it all.
The Talk.Origins Archive presents a more scientific view of physical and biological beginnings.
posted by plep on May 3, 2003 - 6 comments

MMmmm, doughnut. (NYT link, reg. req'd) Lots of great philosophical answers to the old universe question, like our galaxy is in some giant's fingernail, and others. How about this one? Our universe is the shape of a doughnut! (more inside)
posted by msacheson on Mar 10, 2003 - 14 comments

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation gives a map of the curiously unsymmetrical early universe.
posted by Pretty_Generic on Mar 3, 2003 - 12 comments

BAM! The Microwave Anisotropy Probe's long-awaited map of the afterglow of the big bang was released today, and all of a sudden, most of the uncertainty in the concordance model of cosmology has disappeared. We now know, to within 1%, that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. We now know that Hubble constant is 71, plus or minus 4. And though the results agreed stunningly well with the weird picture that cosmologists have about the nature of the cosmos, there was one surprise -- the first stars were born way before expected. Great day for science, and a likely future Nobel.
posted by ptermit on Feb 11, 2003 - 25 comments

Parallel universes Alternate universes may exist besides our own in some ghostly manner. Various science-fiction series explore parallel universes, but what do serious physicists think? Hugh Everett III's doctoral thesis outlines a controversial theory in which the universe at every instant branches into countless parallel worlds. Physicist Andrei Linde's theory of self-reproducing universes implies that new universes are being created all the time through a budding process. Stephen Hawking's quantum cosmology also suggests the possibility of other universes connected by wormholes. Some scientists feel that the famous photon double slit experiments proves the existence of parallel universes in which a photon from one universe interacts with a photon from another. Black hole theory suggests that black holes may be portals to parallel universes.
    Science-fiction stories about parallel universes always delight the mind. Two of my favorite SF novels on parallel universes are Heinlein's Job and Number of the Beast. Several others intrigue me, such as The Neoreality Series, Diaspora, and Parallelities. Science books on the subject include a famous book by David Deutsch.
    Do you have any favorite books on parallel universes or parallel realities, fiction or nonfiction? What do you think? No doubt, scientists and science-fiction authors will continue to explore the concept in the decades to come.
posted by Morphic on Oct 21, 2002 - 64 comments

you know, you're right... it really does look like my morning coffee. but wait just a minute, didn't we say it was more of a blue-green Tidy-Bowl kind of hue? now i am all confused. good thing i didn't go through with that "paint my house the color of space" idea...
posted by grabbingsand on Jun 24, 2002 - 14 comments

Feeling small or feeling big? 39 orders of magnitude that take you from the Milky Way to the proton in an oak leaf.
posted by Chief Typist on Jun 20, 2002 - 9 comments

"Beige. I think I'll paint the universe beige." Remember those arguments we had about the exact shade of turquoise the universe was supposed to be? Umm, computer glitch, sorry. "Fairchild realized the software Glazebrook was using actually took a slightly pinky looking colour as white. 'There was a huge green shift due to the erroneous white point,' he says."
posted by maudlin on Mar 7, 2002 - 8 comments

Are there other universes? It's mind-boggling to imagine how this might be so, but some scientists think it's possible. But if there's no way to detect something, does it really exist?
posted by Prawn on Feb 12, 2002 - 60 comments

And you thought it was #006699.
posted by obiwanwasabi on Jan 10, 2002 - 24 comments

The Universe in One Year Every year on December 31 since I was in 7th grade I think of something I saw in an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I found this: Imagine that the history of the universe is compressed into one year—with the Big Bang occurring in the first seconds of New Year’s Day, and all our known history occurring in the final seconds before midnight on December 31. Using this scale of time, each month would equal a little over a billion years. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for almost two hundred million years - from December 25 to December 30 on this time line. Most of our entire written history fits into the last 10 seconds of the year. It's something to think about while watching the ball drop tonight.
posted by stevis on Dec 31, 2001 - 28 comments

So you think the expansion of the universe is accelerating? Think again! (Contains links to full paper in .pdf etc.)
posted by stuporJIX on Dec 21, 2001 - 2 comments

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science - From the publisher's summary, "Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments — illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics — Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe." May be big. Thoughts?
posted by paladin on Oct 29, 2001 - 26 comments

Oh sure, once again, this "theory" proves nothing. Nothing more than another failed attempt to dismiss God's work. When are these morons, with such an imagination, ever going to admit it, that their theory is nothing more than that. I could ramble on and on like these suppose "scientists" about nothing, and make all these supposed "patterns", milarky, lies, and made up falsehoods on how the universe was just made from some wild explosion. Oh sure, that is how it was made.....just some big bang, then the next thing you know, man walked out of the swamp, got in his Mercedes, and drove away....haha Just keep on believing such crap about this big bang "theory". But just like before, this will fail again and prove that God did create the world, and he has been, is, and always will be the creator, not the "big banger". And that is a FACT, not a "theory".....
posted by tiaka on Apr 30, 2001 - 62 comments

Another thwack at answering Fermi's question. Which is, after scribbling a fairly convincing equation on the blackboard, "If there's intelligent life out in the universe, where are they?" An interesting sidelight is the principal donors: Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft... Both of whom are known for unverifibly abstract big-picture thinking, but maybe it'll pay off this time...
posted by aurelian on Aug 1, 2000 - 0 comments

Black holes blow as well as suck. It's amazing what we find out about the universe. Imagine what we don't know?
posted by crawdad on Jun 7, 2000 - 2 comments

The Big Re-run? "In the first millionth of a second after the universe’s beginning, the entire cosmos consisted of this ultradense, ultrahot brew, scientists say." And now scientists are trying to re-enact the Big Bang. Too big of a task to take on?
posted by Zosia Blue on Jun 1, 2000 - 3 comments